Tag Archive | Christmas

The Theater and Pantomime

Jul22

It is easy to think of Regency England’s upper class being full of starch–going to the opera and concerts for classical music and to the theater for Shakespeare and high-brow plays. However, the pantomime was big business and drew in an audience from all classes. The tradition of a Christmas ‘panto’ was already firmly entrenched by the Regency era. In many ways, the pantomime was the forerunner of the modern day stage musical due to Parliament’s Licensing Act 1737 which limited spoken drama to patent theaters–meaning the three Theater-Royals of Drury Land, Haymarket, and Covent Garden. The Theatrical Representation Act 1788 relaxed this to license occasional dramatic performances that lasted up to 60 days, for such theaters as the Lyceum, but most theatrical runs were of a few weeks, or as even as little as a week or two in the countryside.

Interior Theater with boxes on the sides and the pit with benches

Since pantomimes were all about comic songs and dance, colorful costumes, and spectacular effects (characters flying in or out, water scenes, falls and leaps, and all manner of action) and a good one drew in paying customers, this was the bred and butter of theaters such as Saddler Wells where Joseph Grimaldi often performed. The pantomime was a huge crowd pleaser, but audiences also expected great performances, and this is where Joseph Grimaldi becomes famous.

Pantomime book cover: Life of Goseph Grimaldi

As noted by the description of the book, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian Paperback by Andrew McConnell Stott, “…Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1837) was the most celebrated of English clowns. The first to use white-face make-up and wear outrageous coloured clothes, he completely transformed the role of the Clown in the pantomime with a look as iconic as Chaplin’s tramp or Tommy Cooper’s magician. One of the first celebrity comedians, his friends included Lord Byron and the actor Edmund Kean, and his memoirs were edited by the young Charles Dickens.” Stott’s book is excellent not just for his details about Grimaldi’s life, but for details of the theater, both the performances and what went on backstage.

Pantomime is still popular in England, and Mother Goose is again on the London stage (you can catch a look at a modern version on YouTube), but opened as ‘Harlequin and Mother Goose or The Golden Egg’ on Boxing Day in 1806 with Grimaldi playing the Clown to rave reviews. (A summary of that panto can be found here, but all pantomimes used familiar characters, usually those from folk or fairy tales, and often with Harlequin being the star, or he was until Grimaldi’s Clown made that role the main draw.) Even the larger patent theaters put on a pantomime to pull in audiences–the Mother Goose pantomime penned by Thomas Dibbin premiered at Covent Garden.

Stott’s book is excellent for anyone interested in theater or the Regency era–the details are marvelous. Other articles:

Theaters of Regency England – https://regencyfictionwriters.org/the-theaters-of-regency-london-by-regan-walker/

Joseph Grimaldi, Clown – https://spitalfieldslife.com/2012/02/05/joseph-grimaldi-clown/

Christmas Stories

Nov18

It’s Dicken’s fault–he started the trend. Now, maybe there were Christmas stories around before A Christmas Carol (favorite film version being the one with Alistair Sim), but Dicken’s became the one trotted out every year with the trees and holly and mistletoe. And why fight success. But I actually never set out to write a Christmas story.

Under the Kissing BoughUnder the Kissing Bough started life as a short story. It was supposed to be about 100 pages, and I actually didn’t start out with a time of year, but I did want to see if I could do a novella. I’d been writing a lot of novels and hadn’t done any shorter fiction in a long time, and I actually really, really like the shorter format. It’s a challenge to work in, but can be rewarding. I forgot one thing–you cannot do a short story with lots of characters. Not and do all the characters any kind of justice.

You see, I love to give every character a ‘star turn.’ I think of them all as actors, and every actor–even ones with bit parts–loves to have that great screen moment with wonderful dialogue that moves the story (and the audience). All this mean that with large families (heroine has two sisters, and her parents; hero has father, two brothers, and a former love interest who is now married), I knew that by page seventy, no way was this story ever going to fit into 100 pages. So I put it aside.

And then my then editor at Kensington asked if I’d like to do a holiday book–a Christmas story. “Sure” is always the immediate answer I provide in such situations. And then I had to figure out what I could do for Christmas. Because I can’t just stick on some holy and call it holiday. To me, if an element is not important in the story–and to the characters–it’s got no business being stuck in.

This mean research–as in I needed to dig into English Christmas customs (not difficult since I had a grandmother from Yorkshire and a lot of handed-down family traditions). And I dug out my short story to take another look.

The December setting suited my characters very well–I’d already set up a ‘marriage of convenience’ story (always a wonderful plot to use for historical fiction). Now I could weave in the holiday customs, make them part of the plot and the story (because, in England, you really, really need a very good reason to get married in the cold of winter). There were a few things I couldn’t quite fit into the story due to the limitations of page counts (from the days when that mattered so very much in print)–as in it would have been fun to do more with Twelfth Night celebrations. But I did get other things in there that I loved adding.

And I ended up with a Christmas story.

I’m toying this year with rereading it. I don’t often reread my own work. When you’ve spent a long time writing and revising, another read seems more of a burden than a treat. But it would be fun to do another holiday story. Mmmm…maybe Guy Fawkes day.